Infrequent high-paying jobs aside, repeat work is what you should aim for, either from established clients or via referrals and recommendations from clients and colleagues.  Regular work from a handful of clients pays enormous dividends, including low or no-cost advertising for your business.

Although regular, repeat work from a handful of clients can be a wonderful thing, ensuring your diary is packed with assignments, don’t ever give up looking for new clients. 

Consider the possibility of your only client dying or going out of business, perhaps no longer wanting to work with you.  Aim for at least four or five regular clients while always seeking new.

Sometimes the client will set the fee as is usually so for commercial investigators, store detectives and security guards, in which case you must take it or leave it. 

More often you will set your own fees, sometimes negotiable, sometimes not.  Consider all jobs that come your way, including the lowest-paying, as long as they fit snugly alongside your better-paid assignments.

Importantly, don’t ever cancel low-paid jobs for something more profitable or those few extra pounds you gain could well be your last once news spreads to your client list. Be reliable, be trustworthy, be the best!

Knowing how to price their work is a problem for newcomers who, because they enjoy their job and understand it so well, think it’s something anyone can do and can never command a high fee. 

Rubbish!

You are a professional, a race apart from everyone else, you know how to investigate, you’ve worked hard at improving your skills and attracting clients.   Few clients can or want to do the job themselves and even fewer want to employ staff with all the hassle and pitfalls of setting up payroll systems, facing potential personal and trade union disputes, alongside other encumbrances of the traditional employer/employee relationship.

In short, they, your clients past, present and future, NEED YOU!  And, having worked with you once, found you both reliable and efficient, not to mention a great deal less costly than employing their own investigative staff, they’ll consider themselves very lucky indeed!

You must charge the right price for a job well done! 

How?

In the early days you might set fees close to or lower than your longer established counterparts, but be careful as undercharging can easily leave you out of pocket and label you an amateur. 

Nevertheless, you should take time to investigate, covertly, how your closest competitors operate, both in the kind of services they offer and their pricing structure.  You can also learn a great deal to benefit your business from other companies’ advertisements both on and off the Internet.

Typically fees are set by the hour or day or as a set fee for specific tasks, sometimes pro rata to whatever monies are reclaimed by the investigator.  Be sure to choose whatever suits you best.  For example, delivering a court summons can take just an hour or so, in which case a set fee plus expenses will usually work well, unlike where you are checking supermarket staff suspected of shortchanging customers, a task that could take several days, depending on shifts and staff rotation, in which case a set fee could cause cash flow problems, unlike payment set by the hour with expenses on top.  Higher fees should be set for weekend and unsocial working hours.

Typical earnings are £30 to £100 per hour, depending on your expertise and the nature of the job.  A busy, organised investigator can earn well above the average salary, even for part-time work.   Charge expenses independently of fees and include mileage, correspondence, films, film processing, photocopying, and so on.

The secret to making really good money is to treat marketing every bit as important as carrying out assignments, perhaps more so.

Newcomers worry about how much to charge friends, relatives and past business acquaintances.  The fact is, in virtually every sector of business, some people expect you to work free of charge or for a vastly reduced fee. 

Our contact, a successful London-based private investigator, admits to losing count of times friends, relatives, even mere acquaintances, have requested him to work for them and asked ‘How much will it cost - for me?’

Try not to succumb to low-paid work as a favour, except perhaps for close family.  Charge everyone else exactly the same fee as outsiders and refuse unpaid work at all costs.  You are in business to make money, not to subsidise another person’s lifestyle!

Expenses

Expenses such as petrol and hire cars, hotel and motel rooms, food and refreshments, even danger money, can eat heavily into your earnings and even deplete them entirely. 

Make sure all expenses are agreed by the client before accepting a case and certainly before the contract is signed. 

Certain fees are predictable, but no investigator can accurately predict all possible expenses, such as buying their way out of trouble, using public transport when the company car’s been sabotaged, and so on.  The moral is, make sure clients know that predictable expenses such as travel and subsistence might also be accompanied by unforeseen outgoings such as public transport fares, danger money and paying reluctant witnesses.  Check before spending money the client may later dispute.

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